There was a really interesting article in The Wall Street Journal about how GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: GSK) monitored public forums on BabyCenter.com and WhattoExpect.com. According to the article, GSK used text analytics software over a two month period, allowing it to gather the themes of thousands of posts it de-identified into topical clusters like “safety,” “timing” and “comfort” and sentiments, like “happiness” and “unhappiness,” to give the company a better view of parents’ sentiments than what they might share in an official survey or focus group. It assembled the information into a study in which it concluded that parents often had a lack of “comfort” with the safety of vaccines, and were unconvinced that they needed to vaccinate their kids against measles and mumps.